Edgar Cabanas

Edgar Cabanas is PhD in Psychology by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He currently is Research Fellow at the Universidad Camilo José Cela (co-financed by the Community of Madrid, Spain) and Adjunct Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions (Max Planck Institute for Human Development), in Berlin, where he had previously held a Postdoctoral Research position (2014-2016). His main field of research focuses on the political, economic, and social uses of the contemporary psychological notion of happiness. He has published several scientific papers (Theory & Psychology, Culture & Psychology) and book chapters (Oxford University Press, Suhrkamp), such as Rekindling Individualism, Consuming Emotions: The Construction of Psytizens in the Age of Happiness; Inverting the Pyramid of Needs: Positive Psychology’s New Order for Labor Success; and The Making of a ‘Happy Worker’: Positive Psychology in Neoliberal Organizations. He has been a visiting scholar in the Center for the Study of Rationality at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in 2011 and 2013; he is co-editor of Routledge’s series on Therapeutic Culture since 2018, and researcher in several R&D International Projects.

Interests

My primary line of research is directed toward further developing the thesis that the contemporary discourse of happiness rekindles and legitimizes the ideology of individualism in seemingly non-ideological terms through the discourse of science. More specifically, one of my main aims is to analyze the political model of selfhood (and its main features) that underlies the mainstream academic and popular discourse of happiness, which I call psytizen. I define psytizen as a neoliberal and consumerist kind of subjectivity that renders citizens as clients whose full functionality as individuals is largely tied to the pursuing, development, and consumption of happiness, with happiness understood as the universal leitmotif of human action.

A second main objective is to analyze how the discourse of happiness is applied to public and private policies, both at a macro and micro political level. To this regard, I am interested in how and for what purposes several governments of different countries are currently applying the so-called “Gross Happiness Product (GHP)” to make political decisions —the research project attached focuses on this second interest. I also deal with the use of happiness-based criteria within the organizational realm, trying to examine to what extent happiness is changing the notions of work and worker.

Cabanas, E. (2018). “Psytizens”, or the construction of happy individuals in neoliberal societies. In E. Illouz (Ed.), Emotions as Commodities. Capitalism, Consumption and Authenticity (pp. 173–196). London and New York: Routledge.

Cabanas, E., & Illouz, E. (2017). The making of a "happy worker": Positive Psychology in neoliberal organizations. In A. Pugh (ed.), Beyond the cubicle: insecurity culture and the flexible self. New York : Oxford University Press, 25-50.